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I studied at Utrecht University and all the programming classes in the Bachelor were C#, Visual Studio, XNA, DirectX. Windows. Database class i had to learn in Proprietary Microsoft tools too. All Microsoft stuff. Sure nobody would complain if you did stuff on Linux but all the support by TAs and teachers was on Microsoft platforms only.. The Master was much better but the Bachelor basically was grooming people to become Microsoft consultants.

If the rot starts at the core of your education curriculum there is no saving your dependence on Microsoft.

I always found this choice puzzling to teach people proprietary technologies in a public institution. This was before DotNet core and VSCode was a thing and Microsoft hadnt whitewashed themselves to look like an open source friendly brand yet.

And same goes for less technical disciplines too. Adobe, Autodesk, Archicad, etc. It's pretty bad software: expensive, very buggy, poor extensibility, poorly maintained, closed-source, rapid tech debt accumulation requires upgrading your pc every few years. If only a minor percentage of organizations licensing it would instead spend that budget financing an open source project, that would have a very positive effect for everyone. I can somewhat understand private businesses not thinking long-term, but public institutions paying licensing fees instead of financing open-source seems like plain incompetence. Then again, maybe there's a lack of open-source initiatives willing to spearhead this.
Surely not _all_ the courses... Utrecht was and is big on Haskell as you know... Given that you TA'd a course on it :)
Visual Studio is world class IDE, C# is one of the better designed languages and ecosystems, Windows is everywhere - from home, to enterprise.
It wasn't always that way. When I began studying CS at Utrecht University, there was no Windows at all. It was Solaris, IRIX and a bit of HP-UX.
I've gone without Microsoft products for many years now. It's SOOOOO much better.
I had a similar experience at a different university in NL, practically the entire curriculum was Oracle & Cisco.
The things that's puzzling is that I overall find it much harder getting my toolchains and stuff working on windows.

In my experience, getting the periphery stuff is harder than the contents of the course a good chunk of the time for beginners.

> if the rot starts at the core of your education curriculum there is no saving your dependence on Microsoft.

TBF, the curriculum being MS based can mean very little if the concepts taught in are valuable enough. I've briefly looked at the project linked in your user description, and they don't look nice and absolutely not tinted by MS influence.

It is indeed dancing with the devil, but if MS forks the money to renew the whole university's computer park, clear all the licensing issues and train part of the staff, it can be a boon for the university.

My uni had a deal with Sun (RIP), many basic courses were in Java, all our system programming course we're Solaris targeted, all servers were Solaris anyway so our code had to run there. It's a pretty basic arrangement IMHO.

I spent the past year working for a company that relies heavily on Microsoft for email, productivity tools, and identity management. After that experience, I can say with confidence: never again. The support is astonishingly poor, and user experience feels like an afterthought.

More importantly, using Microsoft at scale can leave your organization fundamentally insecure. The obscure, insecure defaults are, at best, dangerous missteps and, at worst, borderline negligent. I’m convinced that only a small fraction of enterprises using Microsoft have the expertise and budget required to secure it properly.

My personal view is that if your organization depends heavily on Microsoft, it’s not serious about security, whether they’re aware of it or not.

If China can survive — and even start to thrive without ASML and TMSC, then have no doubt that should push come to shove Europe will be able to run a mail server and some office tools.

They’re just hedging that American politics will stop licking the car battery.

Europe's failure to facilitate a competitive tech scene in the early 2000's (and even still ongoing today) will haunt them for decades. Such an enormous fumble that people still celebrate as a win.
So, I'm going to chip in with a different perspective from that of some other commentators on here. The overwhelming majority of computers in the entire world, used by our entire species, have windows as their OS.

While I applaud the use of alternatives to windows and it's apps, universities teach it because it is what their graduates will use in the real world. Governments use it because while it has it's flaws, it mostly works and is a universal standard. It's the toyota of operating systems. The parts and manpower to repair it and use it are available everywhere, and it's cheap and reliable.

When I did a 4 year CS degree at a UK university in the 1980s I don't think I touched anything from Microsoft for the entire time I was there!
At this point all tech is big business. Microsoft or Apple. Azure or AWS. Google Apps or Office. Even dealing with Red Hat feels like you’re dealing with big tech.

And the thing is 99.99% of the time everything works just fine. I think these governments often struggle with moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.

For one reasono another im not seeing any of the currently OSS solutions like LibreOffice/OpenOffice.orgwould not gain much traction and will remain niche even as the MS/Goog options remain entrenched.

The path taken by Blender(propreiety initially to open source) to reach industry lead would to me seem the most viable to make a dent.

In that i think best cost effective options like WPSOffice or Corel Suite , would be a good option.They have the professional usability in the interface and functionality.

Corel is basically leaving the market wide , by mostly collecting rent from lawfirms as they are well taken care of there.Considering they used to have viable Linux options , seems a lack of vision theer to pick up marketshare.

I have found daily-driving Ubuntu at Delft shocking pleasant. Chrome, zotero, obsidian, zoom, and so on all work great. Outlook, teams, and the office suite, and signing pdfs are all the sharpest edges by far.

I feel if the TUs were required to dogfood this, especially if generously funded such that startups could come along and provide the same service and support, that it could be a great positive externality

I completely support not being dependant on a foreign company (or any company at all, standards FTW) and I don't think there should even be a shadow of possibility that an organization like the ICC could be cut off from services due to a foreign directive, but while I have seen it repeated many times, I think the article's opening assertion is not true; https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...

It is very distressing how many organizations have become dependant on Microsoft and the US cloud for core services. I hope that an unintended consequence of the current US administration's approach is that this becomes less so.

> for example, by using its own mail server.

I was one of the people fighting for keeping Unix when the UU went to Exchange. It was a drama: instable af, the MS consultants could not keep it running even for 24 hours at a time while unix had 0 issues and kept chugging along (I don't remember what Unix: I think it was SunOS/Solaris). It was forced through at great cost and effort but of course sponsored by MS. It sucked for years to come.

I was at the UvA too when they moved to, equally instable MS stuff too: I worked behind some of the last Sun machines and got to take a palet of sparcstations, ultras and an e450 home when they got phased out (I still have them and they are still working, of course). Could have all been Linux now but MS was so aggressive and no one listened to profs or students, even in all tech deps who were all vehemently against the move.

Is it really that hard to switch to [google|libre|apache|free|etc.|etc.]? It seems like at the university level the ideas are the important part, and the need to write/spreadsheet at the bleeding edge of functionality much less so?
I can guarantee some dutch banks are also locked into MS. Maybe not the big ones that actually need to care about tech, but the ones that don't care about tech went head-first into Microsoft Suite these last few years.

Its' an awful sight. What's worse is that there's no argument for this extra cost (apart from maybe vendor lock-in), and now no one knows who to blame for the big bill that comes in every month.

Microsoft is destroying their monopoly from within. Office 365 was a staple of the global business landscape.

By injecting CoPilot into it without customer validation is going to be very costly.

I am sure UK universities cannot go without Microsoft. I believe the absolute majority rely on it. And I can see how they rely more and more on it, by stopping using non-Microsoft/local solutions and switching to Microsoft's ones.
step 1. have syadmins run your stuff, recruit ITSM kids to help run it! We all learn and maintain our own hardware, software and get to poke at the fun internals of email, storage, etc.

step 2. cost savings by firing them all

step 3. we get locked in

step 4. oh no how did this happen

Dependence on Redmond and Washington (for high-complexity software, national security, and any other "really hard" stuff) is a very easy, comfy local optimum.

Actual independence would require a great deal of competence, expenditure, hard work, long-range planning, and time living unhappily far from any optimum.

While the Dutch obviously know how to do that - nobody in America is keeping the North Sea at bay for them - I would not bet that they'll actually do it here.

at work I don't need MS at all. It's just used because the IT department prefers it to manage things. I wish we could just use Fedora or Ubuntu.
In my 5 years I was basically only allowed to use Microsoft tools. It's one of the most stupid things I've ever seen.
Oh it's not only Dutch universities.
If a viable Office 365 alternative appears, it won't be a big top-down bureaucratic initiative from the government, or even the universities. It'll be a nimble EU-based startup company building a full office suite and making it available not just to government organizations via a "contact sales" link (you hear that, NextCloud and OpenDesk?), but via one-click deploy to AWS EU region, docker/k8s, and whatever EU-based cloud hosts exist, so you and your friends can test it out at home.

(If the EU never figures out how to allow nimble startups companies to exist, then forget about it)

In my experience it went something like this: Before covid it seemed to be run mainly locally, during covid there was a massive lobby by MS to push teams and most Unis caved and thats how most unis ended up in the MS eco system.
AWS had announced a sovereign European cloud, probably to avoid a loss of business in the long term due to these initiatives. But it's questionable whether this would survive strong political pressure from the US government.
Not just in education, but even at work, companies or even governments would rather have MS, for example, paying them hefty contracts, while hiring borderline minimum wage workers to run such systems. I remember I had similar arguments with an executive before, and I recommended hiring competent people and using alternative tools. The answer was simple: "We don't want to have XYZ department relying on this person/group, but rather on this big popular company." They thought they were mitigating the risk, only to put all their eggs in one basket!
Yes, of course, when their teachers learn to use a FLOSS desktop for all tasks, starting with writing theses and papers in LaTeX... In other words, when they run courses for students to recover what they didn't learn in high schools.

Today, a desktop is the primary epistemological tool; only a FLOSS one is suitable for study, as it reveals what it does and is, or at least can be, shaped according to need. Most are simply IT illiterate, like professors from the 1950s unable to read and write fluently, except they still haven't realised it...

Anyone knowledgeable of history knows the Dutch universities existed for four centuries before Microsoft even existed. With that knowledge the question becomes farcical.
I think a better question is if there is an operating framework that would remove Microsoft's ability to sanction individuals on the whim of the current US administration in lieu of the appropriate EU institutions.

Microsoft's partnership/JV with 21Vianet in China shows that it can be done (with limitations on features) and this is probably the right direction to go.

> Can they do without Microsoft, however? Can they work without Office, Outlook, Teams and OneDrive?

FOSS to the rescue:

* LibreOffice, instead of MS Office.

* Thunderbird, instead of Outlook (even though I don't like the direction Thunderbird has been going).

* NextCloud, instead of one drive (and there are other alternatives, more FOSS-friendly or less so)

* Matrix/IRC client plus Jitsi, instead of Teams.

and they will do just fine - on Windows or on Linux.

Can Dutch universities do with Microsoft? Genuinely how far gone are we that this is a question?
I read quite a lot of bashing of various national and transnational European institutions for relying so much on US tech. But what about YOU, european? gmail, facebook, instagram, twitter, whatsapp, macbook, iphone, uber, steam etc etc are all working fine for you?
Obviously terrible seeing the US government harm its own international standing for no real gain, but if it results in Europe developing viable alternatives to American big tech services, that'd be fantastic.
I have time so I tried to study one or two things. The harsh reality is that every university that supports remote studies I have looked at explicitly or implicitly required apple or even worse windows hardware.
Functionally, they can easily do without Microsoft... I'm more worried about the implications in terms of PsyOps and repercussions... Like they pulled with that ICC judge.
>to be honest, Microsoft is making it increasingly attractive to switch. Now that the company is putting AI in everything, everything is becoming more annoying to use."
Not exactly a sales pitch but TFW north korea has more of a soveign software ecosystem than EU.
In the 90s I used to sort of tease/banter our sysadmin guy at a small, developer-centric company in Europe (SunOS/Linux/etc-focused) in a friendly way with something like:

"It seems to me like all the things you're doing can and should be automated at a larger scale."

Ten years ago when I recalled this I felt sort of good about the prediction. What I predicted pretty much happened.

That sysadmin guy has become some sort of CIO and seems to be doing well.

I did not anticipate the loss of data sovereignty.

.... and now I'm doing like 50% SRE/devops. Who's the sysadmin now, but without physical control of our data?

Germany's ZenDIS with OpenDesk is actively working on the issue too
Europe can do without Microsoft, however it will require a kick in the rear to get there.

I was kind of hoping that the GDPR would be that kick, as it's clear to anyone that Microsoft, or really any other major US corporation, can't actually satisfy that completely as long as they have their tendrils in its European subsidiaries and that the US can compel them give up the information they care about. But this is a rather large elephant the EU has elected to ignore since that's the path of least resistance.

The EU actually realising the using Microsoft as your foundation does break the GDPR and fining the relevant institutions (and fixing itself on that same front!), or relevant institutions being embargoed to the point of not being able to use Microsoft products, as is apparently now the case with the ICC, will probably kick Europe into gear, but it needs to be a solid kick, and not just an institution here and there.

But what's the alternative? Most people use either O365 or Google Docs.

I hate that people are incapable of using Libreoffice and mailing documents around, but modern users are addicted to "the cloud", and it's my understanding there's no EU centric competitor to those two giants.